Transcript
I outline my books and I always have a notion of what the ending is going to be. It’s usually very cinematic in my brain ending. I can see it unfolding and I’m just trying to get there, but there’s a lot that happens when you’re just in it and your mind is just coming up with stuff, and that’s kind of the magic, the fun stuff is when something pops up, a character or an idea or something about the world that you’re just like, oh yes! You have no idea where it came from, and your mind just created it like that. I just think your brain is so cool. I talked about my writing schedule now where I have the whole morning to write, but I really did get trained to be very disciplined because when I started writing, seriously trying to get published, it was when my first daughter was born.
She was a newborn and I could only write when she was napping, and so I just had to learn to, okay, if you may have 15 minutes, you may have an hour. You don’t know, and you just have to switch your brain into that mode and start going, and I really feel like that was a great training. Being a parent of a newborn was good training for being an author, I think. You really learn like that if you just spend a little bit of time every day, even if you only get 15 minutes, sometimes you only have 15 minutes. You can write a whole book that way if you keep doing it regularly.
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Author Christina Soontornvat talks about how the discipline of being a new mother influences her writing process.